There is no scheduled radio coverage of tonight's Boylan-Auburn NIC-10 showdown, but rrstar.com has you covered. Reporters Matt Trowbridge and Chris Green wi...

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There is no scheduled radio coverage of tonight's Boylan-Auburn NIC-10 showdown, but rrstar.com has you covered. Reporters Matt Trowbridge and Chris Green will tweet live throughout tonight's game. Use #auburnboylan and join in the conversation at tinyurl.com/auburnboylan.

ROCKFORD - Boylan won 17 NIC-10 titles in 20 years before Auburn went 31-1 in the league in 2011 and 2012.

Last year, Boylan and Auburn tied for second.

This year, the two face off Friday night in a rare, winner-take-all finale for the NIC-10 title at Auburn that was sold out by noon Tuesday.

Old Guard vs. New Guard.

"It's going to be nuts," Auburn coach Bryan Ott said. "There will be standing-room only and it wil be very loud in a small gym. Players are going to have to execute without being able to hear much direction from the bench.

"The atmosphere will help both teams, playing in a huge game with championship expectations and going into the postseason expecting the same thing."

Auburn vs. Boylan in boys basketball (with apologies to football's Harlem vs. Boylan and Hononegah vs. Boylan showdowns) has become perhaps the NIC-10's greatest rivalry in any sport. It's not just Boylan's past success vs. Auburn's current success. It's their mutual success at the same time. Both schools have finished in the top three in the league seven years in a row.

Of course, top three is never Boylan's goal. The Titans (19-6, 13-2 NIC-10) want to win conference every year in basketball. The way they used to. And the way their football team currently does.

"This rivalry has grown as a result of Coach Ott building that program up into a perennial contender," Boylan coach Mike Winters said. "For us, it's been a bit of rebuilding the last couple of years. We're close to getting back to where we want to be. Friday night is one of those hurdles we have to get over to start reclaiming that."

Auburn (23-5, 13-2) had one winning record in the conference in 22 years before breaking through with a 10-6 mark in 2006-07, Ott's eighth season. That, as much as the back-to-back NIC-10 titles and a third-place finish in the state, the second-highest by a NIC-10 team in more than 50 years, is the key to what Auburn has become.

Before Wichita State star Fred Van Vleet put Auburn on the state-wide basketball map, Darnell Van Vleet, Kashif Maxwell, Eddie Cade and Eddie Bowling - sophomores on that first winning Auburn team - put the Knights on the NIC-10 map.

And kept them there.

"When you are trying to build a winning program, the thing that you want more than anything is to be able to sustain success," Ott said. "That's very difficult to do, because you are always rebuilding in high school with a new combination of players every single year.

"We had no experience with winning. It took finally getting over .500 to turn that around. Fortunately, that wasn't only a one-year, flash-in-the-pan season back in '06-07. The most important piece of that whole puzzle was that team only had three seniors on it and four sophomores.

Page 2 of 2 - "Those sophomores wanted even more for themselves the next year around. That's how that turned and we've been able to continue to progress forward."

Now, both Boylan and Auburn want more every year.

Only one will get it Friday.

"It's unlike anything," Winters said. "A high school atmosphere with a sold-out game and a rivalry; there is nothing like it."

Until they turn around next week and possibly clash again in the Boylan Class 4A Regional, which starts Monday.